Although tens of thousands of protestors have been gathering night after night in Tel Aviv to express their frustration over plans to reform the Israeli judiciary, they possess little sense of direction, observes Haviv Rettig Gur. The leaders of the parliamentary opposition, meanwhile, botched a filibuster they had planned last month because the delegates involved decided to go home early. But the real problem is a deeper one, Gur writes:
It isn’t just that center-left leaders didn’t bother to show up at the early protests until public criticism forced them to. None has come forward to clarify what the fight is about. Slogans about the death of democracy aren’t sufficient. It isn’t enough to know what one doesn’t want to happen; the center-left doesn’t seem to have any idea what it does want to happen.
Much ink has been spilled in the Hebrew-language media about the growing influence of the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative think tank in Jerusalem with anonymous foreign donors and (to the center-left) maddeningly American habits of thought. Kohelet researchers played key roles in developing many of the new government’s policies, making the organization a bogeyman of the center-left imagination.
But this focus is a cop-out, a cover for the fact that the center-left has no equivalent policy shop of its own. It’s easier to frame the government’s policy push as a nefarious, foreign-inflected conspiracy than to respond to right-wing proposals with ideas of one’s own. On judicial or constitutional reform, economic policy, natural gas, Palestinians, Iran, and countless other questions, the center-left sometimes knows what it opposes, but can rarely articulate what it supports.
By failing to advance a serious alternative to the government’s judicial remake, the center-left’s blind resistance to all reform fails to challenge rightist ideas.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-the-knesset-and-in-the-streets-the-leaders-of-the-israeli-center-left-are-mia/